If and when our civilization expires, we may not even agree on the cause of death. Autopsies of empires are often inconclusive.

Sixty years ago, a German historian Alexander Demandt collected 210 different theories for the fall of the Roman Empire, including attacks by nomads, food poisoning, decline of Aenean character, vanity, mercantilism, a steepening class-divide, ecological degradation, and even the notion that civilizations just get tuckered out after a while.

Some were opposites, like too much Christian piety vs. too little. Or too much tolerance of internal deviance vs. the lack of it. Other reasons may have added together, piling like fatal straws on a camel’s back.

Now it’s your turn! Unlike those elitist compilers over at the Pandora Foundation, our open-source doomsday system invites you, the public, to participate in evaluating how it’s all going to end.

Using World Model 2035 as a shared starting condition, we’ve seed-slotted a thousand general doom scenarios. Groups are already forming to team-reify them. So join one, bringing your biases and special skills. Or else, start your own doomsday scenario, no matter how crackpot! Is Earth running out of phlogiston? Will mole people rise out of the ground, bent on revenge? Later, we’ll let quantum comparators rank every story according to probabilities.

But for now, it’s time for old-fashioned, unmatched human imagination. So have fun! Make your best case.

Convince us all that your chosen Failure Mode is the one that will bring us all down!

To get you started, let’s review the vast range of doom scenarios that have already been cataloged by the good (though dour) folks over at Pandora’s Cornucopia: ...

As we mourn Abrams’ macho Star Trek obliteration, it’s a good time to revisit that most Star Trek-ian of accomplishments, Voyager, the most despised object of fanboy loathing in the franchise's history.

A really nice article on what I consider to be the best Star Trek series.

From the article: "From 1995-2001, it offered American audiences something never seen before or since: a series whose lead female characters’ agency and authority were the show. It was a rare heavy-hardware science fiction fantasy not built around a strong man, and more audaciously, it didn't seem to trouble itself over how fans would receive this."

I would be remiss if I did not note that my story “The Tale of the Wicked” is in the new anthology 21st Century Science Fiction, edited by David G. Hartwell and Patrick Nielsen Hayden, which came out this week and is in ...

Matt Damon is off on another sci-fi adventure. Fresh off his star turn in this year's blockbuster "Elysium," the actor will play a small role in the upcoming thriller "Interstellar," which is scheduled to come out in November 2014.

New Yorker (blog) How to Deal with the Coming Robot Apocalypse New Yorker (blog) Once computers can effectively reprogram themselves, and successively improve themselves, leading to a so-called “technological singularity” or “intelligence...

When you discover a new favorite author, you want to dive in and read all of his or her works -- but sometimes, that means a paltry stack of five or six books. And then there are some authors whose output would take years to read.

Climate engineering-which could slow the pace of global warming by injecting reflective particles into the upper atmosphere-has emerged in recent years as an extremely controversial technology. A leading scientist long concerned about climate change offers a proposal for an easy fix to what is perhaps the most challenging question of our time. After decades during which very little progress has been made in reducing carbon emissions we must put this technology on the table and consider it responsibly.

David Keith is the Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Physics in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) at Harvard University and Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Historical fiction and science fiction both use literary time-travel as a means to convey universal truths. We can put ourselves in the shoes of a Civil War soldier about to march into the Battle of Gettysburg and relate to his fear ...

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